Preambles

Recently, I hooked up with someone for the first time in a number of years that I don’t like to say out loud. If you factor in a global pandemic, preceded by an 18-month chronic illness flare, you approach roughly the right ballpark. If that ballpark was located in a city several continents over and you were travelling by foot to reach it.

The number matters less than what happened inside it.

During the pandemic, and especially after the steroids I was taking distorted my body as compensation for stopping my colon from attacking itself, I let my world shrink. I stopped putting myself in optional social spaces. I saw friends less. I delayed things. I became someone who might come next time.

Shielding during COVID became just that, a shield against much more than a viral illness: social obligations, expectations of functionality, having to be seen. I became determined to wield it to its very limits. Oddly, seeing full crowds back at Wimbledon was my cue that the plausibility of this might soon be stretched.

I already had the sort of body that the very dullest of my co-workers would be desperately trying to diet themselves away from every January, but which to me seemed normal enough. I was very much giving magazine shoot ‘before’ photo, but I didn’t desperately covet an ‘after’.

I was disabled at that point by needing to be within sprinting distance of a toilet for months on end when my colon was particularly angry. But, I was able to move through the world without barriers due to my size. No fears that an armrest would prohibit sitting or seatbelt wouldn’t fasten. No googling restaurants ahead of time to check the shape of their seats or the space in a booth.

This I now know as privilege. I was slowly emerging back into the world following the pandemic with a body as something to manage rather than present. A logistical problem. A negotiation with clothes, chairs, fellow commuters.

Desire, in that context, felt like a future-tense concept. Something for the version of me who would eventually stabilise, reduce, recover, normalise. Not for this ‘interim’ self.

The gap between when I was last with someone and when I agreed to meet him wasn’t bridged by a decision so much as eroded by small concessions.

I had edged my way back to some sort of existence. Although, I still imagined myself looking from above like a strange solitary character from The Sims: Gay Millennial Angst edition, ferrying myself from home to work to gym to cinema to home to work, with a predicability well within the abilities of a late-90’s game coder.

Eventually, I stopped nervously scanning the faces around me for signs of familiarity as I darted from the cinema the moment the credits rolled, dreading an old friend calling my name in surprise. Sometimes, I kept my glasses off until I was seated. If not the most cunning disguise, at least reducing the world around me to a comforting blur.

After more deadlifts and kettlebell swings than I care to remember, the world started to promise fewer humiliations. And I noted to be grateful of that. I imagine one day I’ll stop feeling a rush of relief on pulling down a rickety stalls seat in an old theatre and finding myself sat comfortably unencumbered by armrests or company. But I hope I stay a little kinder from it.

The download happened on a night when boredom outweighed dread. I knew to stay away from a certain app, even if rudimentary statistics suggested to me that not everyone on it could possibly be mean, flaky and demanding of perfection, given the number of people on it who tweeted their apparent upset at those qualities. I figured anyone who engaged with my profile had clearly already accepted I wouldn’t be heading to a Men’s Health photoshoot following the meet.

Still, I settled on an app that declared its body positivity from the outset, and allowed for the selection of basic descriptors other than ‘large’ or ‘stocky’, for which I never knew exactly where I stood.

I had a few conversations and shared enough carelessly captured photographs to be convinced I was a plausible and inviting proposition to a small subset of other human beings.

I think most of us have fairly modest aspirations in that regard and are not hankering after universal admiration. But low self-esteem will do its best to make you incredulous of potential admirers on a scale ranging from an apathetically shrugged really? to, at times, absolute certainty that their brain has imposed its own filters on your image, that they’ve misread the contours of your body and are destined for disappointment.

I’d had a busy, not particularly notable week, although I had already come close to exceeding my sociability quota after shivering in a pub garden in my Spice Girls’ t-shirt for three hours to bid farewell to a colleague.

I noticed Patrick - name changed for the purposes of the 10 people who might read this blog - on Saturday morning as I was rushing to get ready to go to the gym.

He looked cute, I envied his dark features, but his profile was intimidatingly sparse. And not that it would really matter much but ‘cooking’, ‘technology’ and ‘outdoors’ were not quite the same options on the ‘interests’ box that I had reached for.

I said ‘hello’ and he said ‘hello’ back, along with a few other comments indicating he might be one of the subset of human beings who considered me a plausible and inviting proposition.

Over the course of a few hours, we very sporadically chatted and I came to the realisation that the conditions were almost perfect for a low-stakes reengagement with this part of life; we had been suggestive, but not escalated to promises that two strangers meeting on a Sunday afternoon would be unlikely able to translate into reality.

Like all good millennials, I had deployed all my resources to find evidence of him online outside of the app, as though a LinkedIn profile and years-old Pinterest board could verify he wasn’t a serial killer. His internet footprint suggested he’d had his own struggles, and I realised he didn’t seem all that different from me.

I expected taking the decision to meet someone again to feel much more agonised or significant, but it suddenly just seemed quietly possible - and infinitely preferable to dragging myself to the cinema to see a film about a crazed killer ape, which had previously been the only contender to extend my weekend activities beyond gym and mopping.

I sleepwalked into inviting him around on Sunday afternoon. I had learned, through my diligent research, that he was Canadian. For reasons I’m not sure of, I had found that comforting, imagining it would add a subtle layer of distance that would make me feel less perceived. I also thought it would provide a natural point of conversation.

I had assumed there’d be at least some acclimatisation after we were introduced. The last guy I’d hooked up with had shown me his post-grad Chinese coursework before anything happened, although he did at least save the topic of his fractured relationship with his Dad for afterwards.

But I sat down. Patrick sat down. And he kissed me.

Actually, he launched himself at me with a kind of enthusiastic momentum that took me aback, not in alarm but in recognition. It was the physics of teenage desire transplanted into two people in their thirties. An unself-conscious forward motion, as if hesitation hadn’t been invented yet.

‘Oh,’ I said, half-laughing, ‘we’re skipping the pre-amble.’

Then I kissed him back, grateful, actually, for the immediate confirmation of how familiar it felt and that I hadn’t had any time to sit nervously wondering whether I still knew what I was doing while we discussed the various provinces of Canada.

Things happened. It was good, if permeated by a strange sense of whiplash that occasionally took me out of the moment, having not expected to be in this position again for months more at least.

A few hours later, we said goodbye. Me still none the wiser about his journey across the Atlantic, but with his earlier enthusiastic efficiency explained by the fact he was dashing to an opticians appointment over the river in town.

Moments later, my brother called to say I was going to be an Uncle for the second time. A strange gift in immediately offering the weekend a competing, less complicated, headline.

But in reality, there was refreshingly little to process. Everything had happened with an unquestioning simplicity, which felt comfortable and safe. I felt the best thing I could possibly hope to feel, just a little more ‘normal’ and softly re-tethered.

There was also a quiet revelation that I was inhabiting a body someone else had accepted as eligible. He didn’t know about the steroids, the weight gain, the careful withdrawal. He had no before picture to compare me against. To him, this was simply what I looked like. There was no narrative of loss or recovery he needed to navigate around. I was not a deviation from an earlier, ‘better’ version. For all he cared, my present tense was my past and would be my future.

My body wasn’t good or bad in that moment. It wasn’t a problem to solve or a source of shame to overcome. It was simply functional, present, doing what bodies do and I hadn’t felt that way in years. Even as I lifted heavier weights, deepened my squats, walked at a brisker pace. They were all solitary pursuits, validated by others at a distance.

For so long, every physical experience came preloaded with an assessment. Is this harder than it used to be? Am I taking up more space than I should? I had grown used to seeing my body as a draft awaiting edits. Something that would eventually qualify for certain experiences once it returned to the orbit of its earlier form. In the meantime, it was for maintenance, survival, and quiet containment. I had made an implicit bargain: fix this first, then live.

No one asked me to do that. Prejudice abounds, but I can’t pretend it’s the early '00s. The internet was full of people who would have confirmed in me the opposite if I’d really taken the time to read and believe them.

I walked to work the next morning feeling a little less ‘sim’-like, or at least as though I’d installed a few expansion packs. But mostly I felt relieved by the lack of any grander sentiment beyond ‘that was nice, I feel kind of normal now’.

If there is an edge, it’s that life now moves from prologue to present tense, which is in some ways a reckoning. When I was in my carefully constructed green room, practising for a hypothetical actual existence, the criteria for happiness and satisfaction were different and smaller.

If this just is life now, with no real reason for safety barriers and shields, I’m going to have to actually live it.

I messaged Patrick a few days later, as he had said I should. That, for all his enthusiasm, he might not have really rated the experience was a small, final hurdle to leap over, and one perhaps I secretly hoped I’d crash into and plummet back to the safety of well-reasoned retreat.

He replied saying he’d had a great time and would love to do it again.

I’m yet to respond, but I hope I do, and that this story remains unremarkable and banal to its quiet shrug of an ending. I hope to gain a few more stamps on my ‘regular human being’ card, which has felt depleted of late.

I spent years feeling like I’m writing pre-ambles to a life I kept postponing. It would be nice to find out what happens when you just continue past the opening paragraph.